Editorial — March 4, 2014

It’s impossible for a right-thinking person not to feel sorry for our nation’s farmers these days.

Producers work hard for their money and have a massive number of variables that can reduce that labour to nothing. Frost. Drought. Excessive moisture. Heat. Wind. Bugs. Storms.

It’s amazing that farmers ever make any money as they roll the dice each year and hope that the weather doesn’t deliver snake eyes.

Last summer, as conditions proved to be ideal for a large swath of our province, it was easy to have a mounting sense of excitement for our producers. All reports suggested that the crops were very good.

And so it proved to be. The largest crop in Saskatchewan history came in.

For it now to be sitting in bins waiting for rail cars to deliver it to port is the ultimate sad irony.

In the year where everything went right, something that hadn’t even been a concern went terribly wrong.

The ineffectiveness of rail companies has been argued to death elsewhere so we’ll avoid piling on.

But as ships wait at port for their deliveries and farmers sit on what has been estimated at several billion dollars of crop in their packed bins, hope must surely be ebbing.

What an incredible way to snatch unlikely defeat from the jaws of glorious victory.